A few days ago Dell announced the availability of its updated gaming laptop, the famous XPS M1730, now available with two GeForce 8800M GTX cards in SLI configuration. While other vendors, such as Alienware, Rock, and so on, are offering the same card, I’m paying attention specially to Dell’s laptop, because it’s more widely available outside the US.
The least expensive configuration with the dual 8800M GTX costs 3399 $ with an Intel Core 2 Duo T7500, 2 GB RAM, 120 GB 7200 rpm hard drive and the usual amenities: 1920×1200 TrueLife screen, Ageia PhysX simulation card…
It’s a very expensive system, so it’s important to assess the performance you can expect from it. At the moment, the only benchmarks available are at Notebook Forums: I’d like to highlight a 10163 3DMark 06 score at 1920×1200 and 34 FPS (average) in Crysis at 1920×1200, detail level high. In addition, you can take into account the benchmarks published for a single card that are widely available in the net (the first ones, published when the card was just released, where fairly complete). A 50% increase in SLI configurations can be considered good, but it varies a lot.
I’m going to summarize here any review or benchmark I can find, so keep in touch!
Update: Extremetech publishes a complete review of the Dell XPS M1730 with GeForce 8800M GTX SLI, including benchmarks in Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes, Crysis and World in Conflict.
More reviews:Â AnandTech.
